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back to school

ok, so i know i have been slack in the posting department as of the last few days but it is because we haven't been in school. we had the martin luther king holiday off on monday and then tuesday and wednesday we were off because of the semester change. so today, we are back. in full force. ready to kick some butt. we have spent the last two days grading and planning and trying to gauge where we are with regard to our school improvement plan. in other words, busy, very busy. now the students are back with us and all the gnashing of teeth (jw speak) and complaints and soul searching between the teachers have taken a back seat to the needs of the kids. this is one of the neat things about this school. i work with a staff that is full of hardworking, caring people. we look at our ourselves, self assess, judge where we are and how we are going to get where we want to go. there is a lot of self-doubt and passion and general craziness as we strive to be better teachers in a bet
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weirdness (or more so than normal)

so somedays are weirder than others. today has been one of those days. my day began this morning bright and early about 7:10 at school when one of our students walked in with a word issue. it seems she had been working at home on a project, saved it, and then brought it to school to print out. however, when she went to print it out here all of her words had changed to weird alien symbols. i thought "no problem, she has just switched the font accidentally to symbols." not so easy. i go to switch the font, and it changes everything to blank boxes. what in the world is going on here? i stare at it for another few minutes and decide i have no idea. moving forward into the day. we began our youth truth surveys today. nothing really weird about the surveys today. it came off without a hitch. one thing that i thought was funny though was the fact when the students finished the survey they had the option of adding youthtruthsurvey as a friend on myspace or facebook. tha
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day 3 in williamsburg

I'm sitting here at my table in the ap world history training and we are looking at the dbq (the document based question) that is a part of the ap world history test. As we talk about it, I am struck with just how important it is that we, as teachers, teach thinking skills. Now that may seem like a no-brainer, but really thinking skills are often lost in the greater quest of content. We spend so much time worrying about content that we often don't take the time to teach kids how to think. We do this because of high stakes end of course testing. The majority of tests that our kids take are based on their ability to answer content specific multiple choice questions. So teachers worry and fret about getting content across to kids. This emphasis on content can be counter productive though. Kids may be able to regurgitate facts and figures for these tests but the current state of end of course tests doesn't really push students to develop thinking skills and that's s
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